Writing Is A Discipline

According to the Second Oxford dictionary, there are 171, 476 words in the English language. Those words are made up of only 26 letters. It is, will be, the desire to manipulate these letters–bending them to will and imagination, this is the game, beloveds. This is the challenge, this is the game, this is the discipline.

In committing to writing, the manipulating the world with words and letters, it cannot be overstated that the focus writing involves is unlike anything else. In sitting down with paper, pen or computer, you agree to allow your imagination to unfold and flow until its cessation. Until its cessation. There is a laser-like need had be writers to know how it all ends. To know what the characters, the line, the scene–the words–we have to know what it all means, how it will sound and how to bend it towards our will.

Writing, the curious alchemy, is a muscle. In developing this muscle, or any muscle, requires time and focus. The strength of that muscle, even its stamina, comes from its use. Maya Angelou said that you can’t use up creativity! However, no talent is strengthened or stretched without discipline–that enhanced focus to improving a situation or circumstance.

Honor this talent you have, this propensity to create worlds and their inhabitants! Embrace the journey writing offers you, what the talent gives back to you, and how far you may stretch out in it. Don’t fear the page, or idea.

Here are three tips to help:

TIME.

Make it. Create it. Make use of it. Writers are bound and unbound by it. There must be a time you take daily to write, work on writing, or exercise that same imagination. Writers are creators and creatures of habit–and for that reason, there is never enough time.

2. SPACE.

There is a soothing in hewing out a place in your own space dedicated to what you love to do. Whether that be your bed, floor desk or couch. Stephen King recommends doing the same thing in On Writing. In King’s wisdom, when you cultivate the space, you are more apt to create more, or desire to create.

3. ENERGY.

There is a power which happens to you when you know the writing is good, when you know you have wielded the wind with the alphabet. The more that comes from you, the more which will come out of you. Some writers and other mystics call it the flow. This creative energy that is palpable and able to be harnessed to unfurl all your imagination holds! Don’t fear that…embrace it, use it.